Wild Poland

We are a small wildlife watching tours company started in 2006 to serve foreign nature lovers in Poland.
Today, we group several experienced wildlife local guides, fanatic nature lovers, keen photographers, mammal watchers and birders. Many are academics, others work in National Parks or nature conservancy NGO’s. All of us share one thing – a great passion for wildlife and environment as well as eastern Poland’s culture. Join us to go birding or see European Bison, Elk, Beaver and even go tracking Wolves, all in the wild eastern Poland. You can choose from a wide range of trips or buy professional guidebooks and detailed maps for self-guiding. We are specialists and fanatics of wildlife watching adventures. Our customers love us, check it out yourself.

Member since: 23 Apr 2015

How the minimum criteria of the responsible travel standard was met...

Economic responsibility

• In general, we employ and sub-contract several local guides, actively seek for new, dedicated people and educate them about our policy. Our 4 and 7-day tours for example, are led by a local tour leader and accompanied by one or two additional local guides from local communities for certain trips: a local scientist or a researcher for trips in the Nature Reserves, a local farmer for a boat trip. Whenever possible, we sub-contract local minibus providers that employ local drivers.
• During our tours, we stay in small, family run guesthouses and agro-tourist farms where the hosts are nature friendly and use not only local products but often grow their own food, too.
• We visit a number of local farms for lunch (locally produced) or just hot drinks (tea, coffee) and wildlife viewing sites, watch towers etc. We make sure all these local farmers are paid fairly for their service, even if we only use their grounds for wilflife watching.

Environmental responsibility

• At our office, we have a strict policy on paper reusing and minimising its use in the first place; we only use 100% recycled, non-bleached paper for printers; we recycle our printer cartridges; we focus on online marketing and don’t produce an excess of printed brochures and the printed guidebooks that we publish are always also offered as e-books
• On tour we encourage travellers to bring their own reusable water bottles and inform them on our policy of minimising water use
• We visit several nature protection sites (National Parks, Nature Reserves) where an entry fee is a direct or indirect contribution to the area’s protection and conservation scheme. We educate travellers about particular nature protection problems and proceedings in certain areas and we apply a very strict policy on minimising our disturbance to nature and wildlife at any time i.e. proper behaviour when out in the wild, not approaching wildlife too close, avoiding trampling of the forest floor and fens etc.
• We minimise our usage of cars and suggest nature friendly transportation like walking, cycling, kayaking whenever possible

Social responsibility

• All our tours are accompanied by a local guide who is environmentally trained and socially aware.
• During our tours we always make sure that our guides pay attention and explain about local culture, especially the ethnic minorities that contribute to the specificity of the area.
• Visiting local communities is an important part of all our tours, we encourage travellers to chat to locals and buy their local produce, souvenirs etc.
• Visiting local nature protection sites is an important part of all our tours and we make sure our guides explain the details of nature protection problems in certain areas. We ask local project managers to have a short talk to our groups whenever possible.